Changing sending credentials can be a challenge, but there are situations that call for it and best practices for doing it right.
You may need to change sending credentials if:
- You are changing your brand
- You want to improve your subscribers' experience
Best practice recommendations
When making changes to an existing email stream, consider the following recommendations to improve your subscribers' experience and manage your sender reputation:
- Change your Friendly-From name and sending address or domain to a meaningful name, ensuring it is recognizable and resonates with your subscribers. Many spam complaints occur when a subscriber does not recognize the sender.
- Choose a Friendly-From name that is short enough so it will not be truncated in the inbox.
- Inform your subscribers in advance of your sending credentials change, especially if it involves a change in the brand name. Encourage subscribers to add the new address to their personal address book or contact list. Test to determine the ideal timing; one to two months should suffice.
- Remind your subscribers often about the upcoming change and your reason for the change. This may reduce the rise in unsubscribe requests and spam complaints you receive during the transition. Keeping subscribers informed may also reduce the risk of open and click rates decreasing at the same time.
- Warm up your new domain. Similar to sending from a new IP address, a new domain does not have a sending reputation and switching over to a new domain without warming it up can cause deliverability problems. Take a similar approach to warming up a new IP address.
- Ensure your authentication records are updated.
- If you are only changing the Friendly-From name and not changing your domain, then you don't need to update your authentication records.
- Update your DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) signatures.
- Update your Yahoo! and United Online complaint feedback loops.
- Update your Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record for a new mail-from (Return-path) domain.
- Update your Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) record.
- Monitor performance for the new domain so you can identify and troubleshoot problems as they occur.
